The Devil Takes Half (35 page)

“
People saw a woman on your boat. Who was it? Voula?”

“
The boy's misbegotten mother? No. It was Petros' grandmother. I don't even know her name. Sad little woman, hunched over, always dressed in black. Came to collect the money for him. I thought I'd be safer if it was a woman. Greeks were apt to talk if a sixteen-year-old boy came calling on an older man. Couldn't have that now, could we?” His voice was arch and self-mocking.

“
Later we moved our operation to the parking lot below Profitis Ilias. It made it easier to transport the heavier items. We'd meet at night. Petros would show me what he had and I'd go over it with him and log everything in so that we could divide the money properly after I'd completed the sale; then I'd pack the lot up and, when it was safe, move it out to the boat. Everything was going swimmingly until Kleftis arrived.”

“
When was this?”

“
Early July, I think. I don't remember, exactly. Petros had gone home with two little gold bulls. He didn't want to sell them. He wanted to keep them, play with them, I suppose. In many ways, he was still a child. He left one out on the table and Kleftis saw it. He slapped Petros around until the boy told him what was going on. Kleftis took half the money Petros had collected, then came after me. We had no choice but to let him in as a partner.”

“
What about Voula, Petros' mother? Where was she when Kleftis was beating the boy up?”

“
Probably putting on make-up. She never interfered with Kleftis.”

“
Surely the boy's grandmother—”

“
She tried to stop him. Kleftis broke two of her fingers.”

Patronas remembered the woman's gnarled hands, the swollen knuckles on her fingers. He'd assumed it was arthritis that had crippled her and hadn't thought to ask. “How did the smuggling work?”

“
Exactly as before, only with Kleftis overseeing the logging in of the artifacts and the dividing up of the subsequent payments.”

“
Did Voula get involved?”

“
No. It was just Petros, Kleftis, and I. An unholy alliance if ever there was one. Grandma no longer came to the boat, no longer acted as courier. Kleftis didn't like her, said she was clever, someone you had to keep an eye on.” A petulant note had entered his voice. “Whenever we were together, he'd torment me. Make sexual overtures to me in front of the boy, crude ones, grotesque. Or flick that knife of his into the ground at my feet and laugh like a hyena when I jumped.”

“
You came to Chios on the same plane as Titina Argentis. Why?”

McLean raised his eyebrows. “I underestimated you, Chief Officer.”

“
Yes, you did.” He waited a beat. He hadn't felt this good in days. “You sneered and patronized me. You assumed because I was from Chora, not London, I was second rate, a backward peasant from a backwater town.”

“
It's a failing of the English, that. We hear an accent and assume the person we are speaking with is at best ignorant, at worst, a fool.”

“
Back to Titina Argentis. Why were you on the plane with her?”

“
She wanted to sell her husband's collection of artifacts and someone gave her my name. We arranged to meet in Athens and go over what she had. I wondered why she wanted to do it there. It didn't make sense. After all, I was going to be in Chios a week later. I remember asking her about the provenance of some of the items, testing to see if the collection was really hers. Most of it was Minoan, and given Eleni's interest, I was sure her father would have left it to her in his will. Mrs. Argentis was evasive and I backed off. My guess is, she was trying to sell the things out from under Eleni.”

“
Did you have any further contact with her?”

“
Titina? No. When she didn't get what she wanted, she became hostile and refused to talk to me. Made the trip here a little awkward, as we were sitting side by side on the plane.”

“
What happened on July twenty-sixth? Did Eleni Argentis catch you and Kleftis up on the hill?”

“
No. She had no idea what was going on. Not that day, not ever.” He looked down at his hands again. “I fear, Commissioner, that it was I who started it all.”

“
How?”

“
Petros had accumulated an impressive collection of
galapetras
, seal stones. Astounding ones, larger and more exquisite than any I'd seen in any museum in the world. I counted them out when entering each one in the ledger—the kind of stone, the type of carving, estimates of age and worth, that sort of thing—and there were fifty. I was sure of this. I counted them twice just to make sure, so there was no doubt in my mind. Aquamarine, carnelian, agate, even a few emeralds mixed in. They'd be easy to sell, I thought, worth a small fortune. When I got to my boat that night, I wanted to see them again and opened the box I'd put them in. There were only twelve. I called Kleftis and asked if he had them and he said no. Petros swore he hadn't touched them either, but Kleftis didn't believe him and beat him half to death. What I didn't realize was that Kleftis had been haunting the site. Not the cave. Neither of us knew about the cave at that point. Petros insisted that we stay in the car when he was up there. I think he was afraid Kleftis would kill him if he found out where he was digging. Petros didn't trust us and would check up on us periodically, always coming from a different direction. Long nights, those were, Chief Officer, sitting alone in the car with Manos Kleftis.”

“
So what site was it that Kleftis was haunting?”

“
The legitimate one, the trenches where Eleni Argentis was excavating. I assume he wanted to find the place where Petros was digging and take it over—squatter's rights, so to speak. Erase the boy from the equation, at least financially. After the seal stones disappeared, Kleftis got it in his head that Petros was stealing from us and that Eleni was somehow involved, and he confronted them at the excavation the next morning.”

He hesitated for a moment. “Petros and Eleni had been examining one of the seal stones when Kleftis and I showed up. Terrible timing, that. Given Kleftis' suspicions, it couldn't have been worse. She was down in the trench and tried to hide it, to protect him, but Kleftis saw them and accused her of stealing from him. She was baffled. She kept looking at Petros. ‘What is this?' she asked. ‘What is he talking about?' Petros just hung his head and wouldn't answer. Shamed, I suppose.”

“
Then what happened?”

“
Kleftis got out his knife.” McLean raised his manacled hands, covered his face with them. He stayed like that for a few minutes. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “I thought at first he was just going to threaten her with it,” he said. “But he cut a deep gash on her forearm. Petros thought he was going to kill her and came after him, screaming, ‘No, no!' Kleftis is a fast man with a knife and he grabbed him around the neck and slit his throat. And then, of course, he had to kill her, too. He took a great deal of pleasure in it, or so it seemed to me. He kept asking her where she'd hidden the rest of the stones. She didn't know what he was talking about and when she said this, he'd cut her some more. I never realized how much blood there was in a human body until that day. I don't know why he had to cut her hand off. A souvenir, maybe. A way to keep me in line. Who knows? After that, it went quickly. She bled out in a matter of minutes. I left it up to him to dispose of her. Rented a Zodiac for him in Izmir. Towed it over here with my boat. We sank it after he was done with it. I paid for it out of funds provided for me by the Americans. Figured you'd never find the trail that way. A bit frightened by that point. Not just of Kleftis, but of being caught and charged as an accessory to murder.”

“
Did you ever find the stones?”

“
No. A couple of other things also went missing, but I never told Kleftis. Not after Eleni. I was too afraid. You should have seen him, Chief Officer. Wiping his knife on her clothes, whistling a little song while he worked.”

“
Was Kleftis the one who attacked Papa Michalis?”

“
Yes. He wanted him gone from the monastery. Killed his rooster, too, tried to write obscenities with its blood in the dirt. Didn't work that way, though. Drew you people to Profitis Ilias like flies.”

“
Was that your wetsuit he was wearing?”

“
No. He had his own, a special one. He claimed it would prevent him from leaving physical evidence.”

And so it had.

“
What about the other woman?”

“
The lady in the cave?”

Patronas nodded.

“
In the weeks after Petros and Eleni died, Kleftis and I explored the hills around Profitis Ilias, mostly at night, and eventually we found the cave. You didn't have enough police to protect the place and it was easy to get by them. He still needed me to sell the artifacts for him and we were hard at work there, carrying things out and boxing them up, the plan being that we'd move them down to the boat after it got dark. It was a holiday, so we thought we'd be safe, that everyone would be away, but then in she comes like Little Miss Muffet, calling for you. Saw us. Tried to get away, but of course, we couldn't let her. Again, Kleftis took his time about it. Enjoying it, luxuriating in it.”

He shook his head. “She was praying and calling to God to save her. I finally got tired of her screaming and told him to end it or I would. He wouldn't, so I grabbed the knife and had a go. A mercy killing it was at that point. An act of kindness. Otherwise, he'd still be up there, torturing her like a boy with a magnifying glass, setting fire to ants.”

“
There were two areas of blood spatter, bloody footprints at both entrances.”

“
She broke free and ran through the cave, found the second set of stairs and tried to climb them, to get away. Manos pulled her down. Cut her some more.”

Patronas had to leave the room. He knew she'd been raped, but he couldn't bear to listen to the details. Finally, he had Tembelos do it.

“
Yes, that, too,” Devon McLean said. “Repeatedly.” He had foregone that pleasure, his taste lying elsewhere, but he'd watched while Kleftis ‘ravaged her.' And ravage it had been. “If I hadn't been a homosexual before,” he said, “that scene in the cave would have made me one.”

* * *

Although it was early, Petros' grandmother met him at the door in her apron. “It was Kleftis,” Patronas said, “Kleftis who killed him.”

Balling her fist, she pushed it against her mouth as he described the death of her grandson. How his mother's lover had killed him. “McLean told me it went fast,” he said. “The boy didn't suffer.”

“
Fast,” she repeated.

“
Yes, McLean said he died in a matter of seconds.”

She didn't cry, which surprised him. He'd expected her to keen, to fall to her knees and have to be helped up, to chant
miralogia
like the women in the Peloponnese whose funeral dirges were said to predate Homer. But she did none of those things. All she did was say Kleftis' name and spit. Then she bade him ‘good day,' went back inside her house, and shut the door.

Patronas sat in his car for a few minutes watching the house, expecting some drama, for Petros' grandmother to reemerge, sobbing hysterically, for a host of grim-faced relatives to arrive to bear witness, but there was nothing. Just the sound of the wind, stirring the trash in the street.

An uninvited in-law finds no place to sit.

—
Greek proverb

A
shutter had come loose and was banging against the window in the front. “Dimitra,” Patronas called as he unlocked the door. The house was quiet. “Dimitra!” he shouted again. He didn't want to be alone, not after last night, not after what McLean had told him.

Quiet, too, was the refrigerator. Unplugged. Its metal shelves stripped bare. All his little treasures, the foods he cherished—the sausages and fish packed in oil, the smoked octopus and
pastourma
… gone. There were no sheets on the bed either, no clean socks in the drawer. He felt like he'd walked into the wrong house. He returned to the kitchen and started going through it again, sweeping his hands back and forth across the shelves in the pantry, the space where he kept his wine under the sink. But like Mother Hubbard, his cupboard was bare. There was no bone for the dog.

This was no warning shot. Dimitra had declared war.

He went in the bathroom and splashed water on his face. Perhaps he should change his clothes. No. Let Dimitra see the vomit, the trail of blood the doctor had left. After taking a shower, he combed his hair in such a way that the stitches stood out and practiced limping in front of the mirror.

Marriage and work, they were like playing backgammon, he thought. One had to dominate the board in order to win, to move from a position of strength. With wives, criminals … it didn't matter. It was the same. Never show your hand or let them know what you're thinking. He patted his pockets for cigarettes. Two packs. It would take at least that before he set things straight and got the matter of the unplugged refrigerator settled. This breaching of the dike of marital expectations.

His mother-in-law met him at the door. Without saying a word, she ushered him in. Dimitra was sitting on the sofa with her purse in her lap. She too had dressed with care. She looked as if she'd been preparing to go to church and was wearing stockings, high heeled shoes, and a spotted black crepe dress she was especially fond of. She'd curled her hair—too tight as always—and put on fresh lipstick. She didn't greet him. She just sat there.